


Contraband

by everythingturnsgold



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:04:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9003505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everythingturnsgold/pseuds/everythingturnsgold
Summary: He found the battered tin early in the morning.He turned down an alleyway, a familiar shortcut on his way to the bakery. He had exactly enough coin in his pocket for three loaves of bread. Not a penny more, not a penny less.And there the tin lay, a bit scratched up with some flaking paint and a couple of small dents. It was and shallow and narrow and long.When Credence opened it, he saw paint.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea what I'm doing tbh

He found the battered tin early in the morning.

He turned down an alleyway, a familiar shortcut on his way to the bakery. He had exactly enough coin in his pocket for three loaves of bread. Not a penny more, not a penny less.

And there the tin lay, a bit scratched up with some flaking paint and a couple of small dents. It was and shallow and narrow and long.

When Credence opened it, he saw paint.

12 tubes of paint that took up nearly the entire tin. Or at least, they would have if they were new and full. The fullest tube was blue. A beautiful sky blue. Only about third of the paint still remained. The white tube was almost empty. It was almost completely flattened, there was no more than half a centimetre still round enough that it could still hold paint. The rest of them were somewhere in between.

The labels on most of them had been torn off. The previous owner had dabbed paint on the caps so you could tell which tube was which. A scrap of paper clinging to the crimson tube, upon inspection, was not intact enough to identify the brand.

The inside of lid of the container was covered in dried paint. Smeared puddles of colour overlapped and blended into each other. Some had built up on the sides of the lid as well, with mostly-clean streaks of tin shining through where closing the little box had scraped the paint away. The bottom half of the tin looked to be in similar condition. A couple of smooth wooden sticks could be seen in the gaps between paint tubes- brush handles?

Credence closed the box, tucked it into his jacket, and continued on his way.

He stopped to readjust the box before opening the door to face Mary Lou again. He didn’t want her to take this one small piece of colour from him before he could even experience it.


	2. Chapter 2

He hid it away, tucked under his one warm-ish coat that was neatly folded in a box under his bed. He wouldn’t need to bring it out for another two months. He had two months to figure out where to hide it during the winter.

He hadn’t tried it yet. Sometimes he would pull it out just to look at it. There were two paint brushes. One was as fat as his thumb and the other looked like it could make lines as fine as a pencils. They were both circular and soft.

Credence couldn’t tell what shade of brown the bristles had been originally. They were tinted similar shades of blue-green. He tried washing them as soon as he had an opportunity. He gently lathered soap into them and when he rinsed them he saw the water ran clear. Stained from use? Dyed? It didn’t matter. They were his now and they were beautiful.

They weren’t new and nobody who looked at them would think so. There were some tooth marks along the handles; like someone had placed them between their teeth to hold them and had bitten down too hard. The brush on the little one was loose. It could be pulled off of the handle with a bit of wiggling and slid back on just as easily. He taped it down, he would glue it later. Some of the bristles on the larger brush stuck out at odd angles. He tried to bend them back into place but that didn’t work. He carefully trimmed them off with Mary Lou’s sewing scissors.

He never scraped or wiped the dried paint off of the inside of the tin. He liked how it looked and loved how it felt. He liked to run his fingers over the dusty, somewhat uneven paint. There wasn’t enough colour in the Barebone household and what little there was was often off limits to him. But these colours were his and his alone. Some were muddy and some were vibrant and one corner was the colour of mustard. It was nothing particularly extraordinary. It was no competition for some of the landscapes or portraits that he saw on packaging or advertisements in shop windows, but it was beautiful nonetheless.


	3. Chapter 3

Winter came and went without discovery. He wanted to try them, he really did. He didn’t want to waste them though. He spent winter collecting what scraps of paper he could- flyers mainly- and drawing on them. He would carefully fold up his last few flyers and stash them in his breast pocket when he could, when nobody was watching.

He had found a pencil on the ground, dirty and battered but his. He wiped the mud off of it but left the dirt that was caked into the dents in the soft wood. It had no eraser left and was half the length of a new one but that didn’t matter. Mary Lou wouldn’t notice the pencil missing from the small collection of writing supplies she kept in the kitchen because it was never there in the first place.

He drew and drew and drew and drew. It wasn’t very good. But Credence had something to work towards, he wanted to draw something nice enough to paint. He started with drawing things. He drew his bed, his hat, his paint tin. It didn’t matter that he had no eraser, it wasn’t long until he learned to draw the lines so lightly you could hardly see them.

It took a lot of practice to get things right- lines had to be moved and adjusted, things added or straightened or taken away. When the outline was okay, when there was enough on the stolen paper for the guidelines he needed, he would trace over the lines he wanted to keep; firmly pressing the pencil down to create dark, kind-of-shaky lines. Sometimes his hands hurt too much to hold the pencil this firmly. He would fold the paper back into a little square and put it in his tin for another day. Most of them were ripped up and thrown away after he finished them. Always in public garbage cans at least three blocks from home.

Maybe they weren't good enough or maybe he didn't want to hide a large stack of paper or maybe he didn't think to keep them in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm thinking I might draw/paint some little things to go along with this. Good idea or no?


	4. Chapter 4

He opened the tin, determined to finally try. He had drawn something worth painting. He had saved two small glass bottles from the garbage. He’d washed them thoroughly and picked off the labels. One was filled with clean water and the other was waiting to be filled with the water that was too dirty to use. He had wiped the residue out of a shoe polish tin he fished out of a trash can and used that to hold water for wetting and cleaning his brushes.

He had drawn a pigeon. Well, he had drawn two. The first one was shaded in darkly with pencil and almost looked like the silhouette of the bird when it was perched in front of a window at dawn or dusk. 

He took the tubes of paint from his tin. He lay them on the table in order from most to least full. He took a tiny bit of black paint and mixed it with water in the polish tins lid. He needed grey and didn't want to use the last drops of white paint to achieve it. He soaked the brush in the grey-ish water and tested it on a corner of the newspaper. It was too dark and so he added more water and tried again. Still too dark but closer. 

He started filling the pigeon in. The water was sucked right into the paper and bled over the outline a bit. It looked so much darker than he’d wanted it to. He added a bit more black then swiped the brush over the neck twice for some stripes. They bled. 

He would do better next time. 

He carefully lay the soggy pigeon out under his bed to dry, stashing his small painting kit with it. He had chores to do, he may as well do them.

When he had enough time to himself, he pulled everything out again. The newspaper was wavy from the water and had dried a lighter grey. It wasn’t the shade he had wanted but it was much lighter. A bit too light maybe. 

He decided to add to it, just a little. He added orange for the beak and the eye and when it was dry he went over it with a pencil again. When he finished, he was so very pleased with what he had done. It wasn’t the prettiest pigeon. It was simple. The paint was a bit uneven and things bled into each other where they weren’t supposed to and not everything was inside the lines. But he did it himself.

Not pretty.

Not perfect.

But his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not know how to draw birds. Also I painted this on the corner of a wine advertisement which I find hilarious because prohibition. Thank you all so much for the kudos!


	5. Chapter 5

He started collecting new materials to paint on. Cardboard from discarded packaging, scraps of wood, even candy wrappers. He liked to see how the paint behaved on different things, how it soaked into the unfinished wood and beaded on the waxy wrappers. When it came to drawing though, Credence preferred newspaper over anything else. It was a soft and smooth and his pencil flew over it with ease.

He had found an art store and checked their garbage bins sometimes. Just a quick look when they were left out for collection if nobody was around on the rare occasion his errands brought him by on Wednesday evenings. He found some nice things.

A pad of watercolour paper, stiff and textured and perfect for his painting. Someone had spilled ink on it, it had run down the edges of the paper and glued the pages together. He brought it home and gently separated the pages, sliding a knife between them and working it through the sticky black edges. They didn’t separate perfectly and the edges of the pages were permanently dyed black but that was okay.

He filled each sheet with care, front and back, covering every inch with precious pigment. Drawings wedged between drawings. Plants and small objects and sometimes just swirly lines. Everything on that page was painted with care. He saved the least damaged pages for bigger, more beautiful paintings.

At first he tried to avoid using the colours that were caked inside the tin he had found. He felt like maybe he would ruin them somehow. He wanted to preserve it, to keep that little piece of art from whoever had owned it before.

It wasn’t long until he realized that it didn’t matter. His own mixing tin became something similar but different and just as wonderful. Better even, because it was his.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely forgot to post this? ADHD is wild.   
> I ended up splitting this into two chapters so I gotta flesh the other one out a bit more but it shouldn't be too long before I update again!


	6. Chapter 6

Weeks passed and he found a box of chalk pastels that were all broken into little pieces. They were too small to hold properly but that didn’t make them any less useful. 

Chalk pastels were perfect for his newspaper drawings, he used them when he could. He loved blending them with his fingertips, loved how smooth they felt on the paper. Sometimes he would try to pretend the colours on his hands came from inside of him and on the rare occasion that it worked it made him feel a bit less ugly on the inside. 

He always took great care not to let any colour cling to his sleeves. He always laid something underneath whatever he was working on to stop the pastel from smearing itself on the desk or the floor. He had taken a worn out dish towel from the kitchen to wipe his hands on after cleaning up. 

Credence started drawing hands around this time. He had realized how pretty they could be. He would use his left hand as a model. 

He never drew his scars. 

His art steadily improved and days and weeks and months passed by. He made something almost every day (or at least he tried to). He kept almost none of his completed works. There just wasn’t anywhere for him to put all of this paper and anything he did try to keep smudged and spilled pigmented dust if he ever handled them wrong.  

It took time to figure hands out well enough that he liked more sketches than he didn’t. He started shading in some of the better ones but never the best. No, the best ones were tucked safely away in his his half-filled watercolour pad where they could not be wrinkled. They were never shaded or coloured in because he was afraid of ruining them and knew that the second he added the messy chalk pastel he wouldn’t be able to keep them.

He had to keep them. They were an accomplishment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey so?? I just realized I never stuck a link here but if you're interested in seeing any of my Credence-related thoughts/nonsense I have a blog dedicated to him that you can find [here](http://ilovecredencebarebone.tumblr.com). I've also got an artist Credence tag if you want more of this without waiting for me to get around to updating :)


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